We all know glasses change the way we look but in some cases they can really make the man (or woman!). John Lennon was so attached to his round coloured Windsor style glasses that the style is now almost solely referred to the ‘Lennon’. Not only do the ‘Lennons’ show how much power a pair of glasses really can have when placed upon the nose of an icon, but it also says a lot about the media. Lennon glasses could just as easily been called after Groucho Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, or Joseph Stalin, – they all wore the same style.
The movie Top Gun, starring Tom Cruise as Lt Pete “Maverick” Mitchell and Kelly McGillis as Charlotte “Charlie” Blackwood with adequate support from Val Kilmer as Lt Tom “Iceman” Kazansky, launched several careers and fuelled many an adolescent fantasy, arguably the real stars though were the aviator sunglasses that adorned the cast in most of the movie. In the immediate aftermath of the screening, sales of this particular style took off a quickly as the F14 Tomcat jet fighters, which at the time were the zenith of US naval aviation. Aviator style shapes are also the preferred designer sunglasses of Cristiano Ronaldo and were the accessory of choice for the late king of pop, Michael Jackson.
Designer glasses are of course mainly about image, but sometimes that image doesn’t need to be tremendously cool. You only have to look as far as the two Ronnies with their horn rim specs which were all the logo their show really needed. Easily as widely recognisable as the glasses of Cruise and Lennon, these specs had a very different agenda of deliberately making the wearers look as silly as possible. Snooker player Dennis Taylor’s famous designer glasses had a distinctive, swivel-lens, upside-down design. They might have looked more than a little strange but there’s no question they helped him win the world snooked title in 1985. One strange celebrity glasses situation was that of comedian Eric Sykes who was never seen without his trademark black horn rim specs. In fact there was nothing wrong with Sykes’ eyesight, instead the ‘glasses’ were merely a bone-conducting hearing aid, and contained no glass at all.
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